Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan

Con te n ts Acknowledgments | xi Prologue: May 19, 1924 | xiii 1. The Antagonists | 1 2. Fr. Sorin and the Birth of Notre Dame | 21 3. The Reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan | 43 4. Notre Dame and the Indiana Klan | 61 5. The Klan Takes Over Indiana | 97 6. In the Crosshairs of the Klan | 113 7. D. C. Stephenson’s Grab for Power | 131 8. The Rally and the Riot | 145 9. The Ambush | 163 10. The Ascent of Notre Dame | 179 11. The Ruin of D.‑C. Stephenson and the Collapse of the Klan | 193 12. The Aftermath | 215 Epilogue | 225 Notes | 231 Bibliography | 247 Index | 253 ix

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The AnTAg onisTs

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J une of 1893, the h oly C ross brothers who ran St. Columbkille’s School in Chicago lined their boys up and marched them by a tired-looking priest. Their distinguished visitor was Fr.-Thomas Walsh, the president of the University of Notre Dame, the most esteemed Catholic school in the country. He suffered from Bright’s disease and was visibly ill; in fact, he would live less than a month longer. The brothers hoped that a parade of their youngsters might cheer him up.1 Like the rest of the boys, young Matthew Walsh concentrated on becoming invisible as he marched past the priest. It was not to be.

“Come here, Matthew,” said Br. Marcellinus. Walsh reluctantly stepped forward. As the school’s most promising student, he was frequently called on to recite for visitors the five sorrowful mysteries, the seven dolors of Mary, the fourteen stations of the cross, or any of the other memorized lists that characterized his religious instruction. Such performances were usually followed by teasing and taunts of “teacher’s pet” on the playground.

“Fr.-Walsh, this is Matthew Walsh,” said the brother, seeming amused by the coincidence of their last names. The priest smiled weakly as he patted the boy’s head. He looked as if he barely had the energy to stand.

“Pleased to meet you, Father,” said Walsh. The priest nodded. n

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“Fr.-Walsh is the president of the University of Notre Dame,” said Br. Marcellinus to the entire class. He swept his hand dramatically across the room, stopping at a picture of Notre Dame’s famous Golden Dome hanging on the rear wall. The brothers of St. Columbkille’s, as Walsh and the other boys well knew, belonged to the Congregation of Holy Cross, the same order that ran Notre Dame. Good behavior in the classroom—often by Matthew Walsh—was rewarded by the compliment that there might someday be a place for such a youngster at the great Catholic university.

Although the teasing kept him from saying so aloud, the young Walsh hoped the prophecy would come true. His parents hoped so too. For a boy from a family like theirs—immigrant and poor—to go to college at all would be a great achievement.

Matthew Walsh’s father, David Walsh, was born in Mitchellstown, County Cork, Ireland. His mother, Joanna Clogan, born in Troy, New York, was also of pure Irish stock. Walsh’s father was part of the vast human wave that left Ireland in the nineteenth century, fleeing famine, British oppression, and economic hopelessness. In the years between 1845 and 1855, more Irish left their country than had previously emigrated in the country’s entire recorded history.2 The Irish had few illusions about ever returning to the mother country. Of all the ethnic groups streaming into America, only the Jews had a lower return rate than the Irish.3 In nearly every large city in America, the Irish claimed neighborhoods as their own by crowding the tenements, building churches, and winning political offices. The Walshes settled in West Town, Chicago, a neighborhood where it was not at all remarkable to find people named Walsh—or Murphy, or Kelly, or Sullivan, for that matter, the only Irish surnames more common.4 Even the parish’s patron, St. Columbkille, was an Irish import, a rash prince who became a holy man in exile.

An array of stereotypes followed the Irish to the New World, most revolving around the twin activities of drinking and brawling. No one knew better than the Irish themselves that there was a grain of truth

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to these prejudices. Irish boys did tend to become wilder as they got older and were quick to fight. There was unquestionably an element among them that did more than its share of drinking. The Walshes encouraged the quiet studiousness of Matthew, the seventh of their ten children, in part because it was so rare.

Walsh was born on May 14, 1882, in Chicago. From the start, he impressed every adult in his life. His parents hoped that his academic achievements might earn him a place at Notre Dame. To get into college, though, Matthew would need more than stellar grades and scholastic performance. He would have to fulfill an even greater dream of his parents, neighbors, and teachers: he would have to become a priest. Joining a religious order was just about the only avenue to a higher education for children of immigrants in America at the time.

The Walshes believed that such a life brought great spiritual rewards.

Priests dealt with “sacred matters in a sacred language.”5 They welcomed babies into the church with baptism and administered the last rites to the dying. By virtue of having been called to a life in Christ, parish priests had unequivocal authority within their communities. Their authority was rooted in the fact that they could do something that no one else on earth could—they could celebrate Mass.

For a family like the Walshes, there were considerable earthly rewards to the priesthood as well. Not only would the door to higher education be opened for a young man who wanted to become a priest, but his family would also be treated with great respect and admiration within their community. Large Catholic families like the Walshes were not unusual at the turn of the century, nor were their priorities.

Seminary applicants were plentiful, and thus the seminaries could afford to be highly selective in choosing whom they committed to feed, clothe, educate, and employ for a lifetime. Matthew Walsh’s acceptance into the seminary would bring great credit to his parents and teachers.

In addition to being educated and esteemed as a priest, Walsh would enjoy a standard of living that would be a measure higher than what his siblings experienced; he’d perhaps even have a laundress, a cook,

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and a housekeeper.6 Matthew Walsh’s family and teachers made sure that he knew from a very young age to listen closely for a call to the priesthood.

The center of Walsh’s community, both literally and figuratively, was St. Columbkille’s Church. Division Street, Lake Street, Hoyne Avenue, and May Street formed the boundaries of the parish, an area roughly fifteen city blocks on a side.7 The Catholicism that Walsh learned there was as rigidly defined as the parish boundaries. Families in the parish were expected to rent pews. The pews were reserved until just after the first Gospel reading, by which time everyone could see which families were absent. The pews were then made available to nonrenters in exchange for a “voluntary” offering of ten cents. No marriage ceremony would be performed after 5:00 pm. Funerals had to be arranged by family members, not by the undertaker. Parishioners wishing to donate money to Catholic causes outside the parish needed written permission from the pastor. Every aspect of church life was regulated with cheerful fervor by the church’s rector, Fr.-Nathan Mooney, Notre Dame class of 1877.8 In 1896, at the age of fourteen, Walsh completed grammar school and moved up to the brothers’ high school. As the rest of the boys in school got louder and bigger, his reticence grew even more conspicuous. Unlike his swearing, brawling peers in West Town, Walsh was becoming a young man who could absolutely swim in silence. Walsh’s grades, demeanor, and piety all seemed to confirm what religious men had been telling him all his life: he was different. At the dawn of adolescence, his self-awareness became acute. In 1897, after completing a single year of high school, Matthew Walsh fulfilled the expectations of everyone around him. He announced to his family that he would like to join the priesthood. The choice of orders was clear. The Holy Cross brothers of St. Columbkille’s scurried to enroll him in the seminary at Notre Dame. He was fifteen years old.

Walsh left for Notre Dame in the summer of 1897. He and his mother took the train from Chicago to South Bend, Indiana, the home

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of Notre Dame and Walsh’s home for the next six years. To Walsh, who had been a city boy all his life, the trip was like traveling into a great wilderness—he watched out the window as the northern Indiana forests and the shore of Lake Michigan rushed by him. It was a quiet trip.

Walsh’s mother would occasionally clear her throat or gather her breath as if she was about to speak, but she never did. At the train station in South Bend, they boarded a horse-drawn carriage for the two-mile trip to campus. Walsh recounted his arrival at Notre Dame years later to his friend and Notre Dame historian Arthur Hope, who included the story in his book Notre Dame: One Hundred Years.

“We need to go to Notre Dame,” his mother told the driver. “My boy is going to be a priest.”

“Very good,” said the driver as he snapped the reins and started them forward. Walsh could tell that his mother had expected a more energetic response.

The carriage soon pulled up to the steps of the domed Main Building, the same building pictured in the photograph that hung on the wall of Walsh’s grammar school classroom. The breathtaking architecture was offset by the appearance of a rotund, unremarkablelooking priest standing on the building’s front porch with his hands in his pockets.

“These people want to see Fr.-Corby!” the driver shouted to the priest. Walsh remembered that Fr.-William Corby was the provincial, the head of the Holy Cross order at Notre Dame.

“He’s in the presbytery,” said the priest.

As they continued on their way, Walsh’s mother asked the driver about the priest on the porch.

“That’s Fr.-Morrissey,” he said, surprised that she didn’t know. “The president.” He stopped the carriage at the door of a small gray building.

It was easy to find Fr.-Corby’s office in the deserted building.

Through his open door they could see him working at a tiny desk. He looked up as the mother and son he had been expecting appeared in

(continued from front flap)

h i s t o ry / g e n e r a l n o n f i c t i o n

plex men: Fr. Edward Sorin, Notre Dame’s legendary founder; Fr. Matthew Walsh, an intellectual and war hero who was president of Notre Dame at the time of the riots; Knute Rockne, the university’s revered football coach who helped quell the street fighting; and Klan head D. C. Stephenson, an erratic genius whose sexual deviancy and murder conviction helped destroy the Klan organization that he had built.

The dramatic events that unfolded during that violent weekend in May marked a powerful turning point for American Catholics as they continued to overcome widespread prejudice and take their place as accepted members of mainstream America.

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On May 17, 1924, thousands of hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan converged on South Bend, Indiana, to terrorize the students of Notre Dame. A weekend of rioting ensued, with the “fighting Irish” prevailing in

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T o d d T u C k e R received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Notre Dame and served as an officer with the U . S . N a v y ’s n u c l e a r s u b m a r i n e f o r c e .

He is the author of Notre Dame Game Day (Diamond Communications, 2000) and has written for several national magazines, including TWA Ambassador, The Rotarian, and Inside Sports. He lives in Valparaiso, Indiana, with his family. Visit his Web site at www.ToddTucker-

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N ot r e D a m e vs. the klan

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How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan

Todd Tucker

his long-forgotten confrontation between the Ku Klux Klan and the University of Notre Dame was a watershed moment in American social and religious history. Before May 17, Catholics struggled to gain acceptance in a Protestant America riddled with anti-Catholic bigotry. Within months of the South Bend riots, the Indiana Klan was in rapid decline, and Notre Dame’s national champion football team was the toast of an admiring nation.

In this compellingly written narrative, Todd Tucker tells the tale of two strong institutions headed for a showdown. By 1924, the Ku Klux Klan was the most powerful organization in Indiana. It boasted 350,000 members—one out of every three white men in the state. The Klansmen disliked and feared Catholics, whom they saw as aliens in a Protestant America. They especially loathed Notre Dame, the most renowned Catholic university in the nation and the symbol of American Catholic pride.

The clash between Notre Dame and the Klan was shaped by four brilliant and com(continued on back flap)